Heart of darkness

It can happen that the first topic you might be talking about with Frauke Eigen are aeroplanes. Transall aircrafts taking off, rumbling clumsily from a airfield somewhere in Bosnia. Or a stand-by Boeing of the German Bundeswehr which transported her alongside a permanent secretary from the foreign office to the Balkan. Or a windowless UN plane in which she last travelled to Afghanistan.

Apparently, it had been making its way to Kabul pretty much like a bird of prey swooping down directly above the city. When travelling, Frauke Eigen has to take what she can get. Most regular airlines simply do not operate services to the places she is interested in. After all, these are crisis areas.

Fighting may have often ceased but still, these regions are a long way off from normalcy. They are societies in a transitional state where violence has left behind ugly wounds and fields of rubble. And, alas, the peaceful melancholy brought about by sheer exhaustion.

Why Frauke Eigen, a 33-year-old slender woman, keeps visiting war-torn areas, is an enigma even to herself. These journeys touch a side in her she talks about only reluctantly. In fact, she is no great talker to begin with. If she talks at all, this Berlin-based photographer does it with such a low voice that it is difficult to make out what she is saying. It is a peculiar, idiosyncratic contrast to the deeply-black large-format pictures she takes in the shadows of terror and destruction: A young mother’s worried glance at her sick child which is being examined by a doctor; the head of a sleeping child leaning on another woman’s shoulder; a boy at a river bank smiling for the camera while he is stepping out of the water, freezing. War does not occur in these photos and yet, they possess a somber power which also exists in the pores, headscarves, and clothing of these people as if it is black, cooled-off, crusted lava.

When the Afghan National Gallery will reopen shortly in renovated splendor, it is these images that will be adorning its freshly-plastered walls for the first time. When the Taliban moved into the center of the city back in 1996, the building was in a miserable state.. With water-colors, an Afghan doctor and amateur painter had quickly painted over many artefacts in the collection so to protect them from destruction, since the religious zealots destroyed every image in all of Afghanistan which depicted people or animals: it was topic matter forbidden by the Koran. After the ousting of the Taliban, the building, once an upper-class residential building, was a sorry sight and “badly wrecked“, says Renate Elsässer from the Goethe Institute. “The Taliban tore open the walls to get to the copper wire from the electric wiring.“

Renate Elsässer first noticed Frauke Eigen while she was spending several weeks last summer recording the efforts of the Technische Hilfswerk (a state-owned relief organisation dealing with technical and organisational aspects) in setting up rebuilding projects and, whenever time allowed, took urgent, vivid portraits, and landscape photographs. She wants to give a cycle of 27 works to the National Gallery – a gift which could just become the basis for a collection befitting a museum of this kind.

What distinguishes her art from reportage photography is that Frauke Eigen does not record living circumstances. Instead, she “extracts“ people from their surroundings, looking for something beyond cultural identity and social contrast. In Afghanistan, it was not the Kalashnikov warriors nor the soldiers from ISAF nor the people from the NGOs who interested her and neither did she want to capture the countless ruins which a civil war lasting 25 years has heaped upon the place (“a gigantic rubble heap of history“). Instead she photographed women and children or a barren range of hills — no easy feat in a country where the act of walking up somewhere unreservedly and observing something is simply not done. Especially not when you’re a European. And a woman. And on your own. “I have never been able to develop a sense of how dangerous any given situation actually was“, Frauke Eigen admits. “Whenever you showed up, there were people surrounding you, staring at you.“

As a preparation for the journey she immersed herself in accounts by Afghan women. All shared an identical cover-photo: a veiled woman whose facial features remained hidden behind latticed slits. In fact, 95% of women are wearing the Burkha even now, after the fall of the Taliban regime. “But you would be quite wrong to assume that demure little nothings are hiding underneath“, states Eigen